Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “And he’s nice to you?”

  She looked away with a shadow of something in her face. “I feel unbelievably safe with him. Like, I was thinking, if we’d been in the towers on September 11, even on a high floor, he would have found a way to get us out. He would have gotten us through, I just have that feeling.”

  “There were a lot of guys like that at Cantor Fitzgerald,” Joey said. “Very tough traders. And they didn’t get out.”

  “Well then they weren’t like Nick,” she said.

  Seeing her close her mind like this, Joey wondered how hard he would have to make himself, and how much money he would have to earn, to even enter the running for the likes of her. His dick, in his boxers, bestirred itself again, as if to declare its upness for the challenge. But the softer parts of him, his heart and his brain, were awash in hopelessness at the enormity of it.

  “I think I might go down to Wall Street and check it out today,” he said.

  “Everything’s closed on Saturday.”

  “I just want to see what it looks like, since I might end up working there.”

  “No offense?” Jenna said, reopening her book. “You seem way too nice for that.”

  Four weeks later, Joey was back in Manhattan, housesitting for his aunt Abigail. All fall, he’d been stressing about where to stay during his Christmas vacation, since his two competing homes in St. Paul disqualified each other, and since three weeks was far too long to impose on the family of a new college friend. He’d vaguely planned on staying with one of his better high-school friends, which would have positioned him to pay separate visits to his parents and the Monaghans, but it turned out that Abigail was going to Avignon for the holidays to attend an international miming workshop and was worrying, herself, when she met him on Thanksgiving weekend, about who would stay in her Charles Street apartment and see to the complex dietary requirements of her cats, Tigger and Piglet.

  The meeting with his aunt had been interesting, if one-sided. Abigail, though younger than his mother, looked considerably older in all respects except her clothes, which were tarty-teenage. She smelled like cigarettes, and she had a heartrending way of eating her slice of chocolate-mousse cake, parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day. Such few questions as she asked Joey she answered for him before he could get a word in. Mostly she delivered a monologue, with ironic commentary and self-conscious interjections, that was like a train that he was permitted to hop onto and ride for a while, supplying his own context and guessing at many of the references. In her nattering, she seemed to him a sad cartoon version of his mother, a warning of what she might become if she wasn’t careful.

  Apparently, to Abigail, the mere fact of Joey’s existence was a reproach that necessitated a lengthy accounting of her life. The traditional marriage-babies-house thing was not for her, she said, and neither was the shallow commercialized world of conventional theater, with its degrading rigged open calls and its casting directors who only wanted this year’s model and had not the airy-fairiest notion of originality of expression, and neither was the world of stand-up, which she’d wasted a verrrrry long time trying to break into, working up great material about the truth of American suburban childhood, before realizing it was all just testosterone and potty humor. She denigrated Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman exhaustively and then extolled the genius of several male “artists” whom Joey decided must be mimes or clowns and with whom she declared herself lucky to be in ever-increasing contact, albeit still mainly via workshops. As she talked on and on, he found himself admiring her determination to survive without success of the sort still plausibly available to him. She was so dotty and self-involved that he was spared the annoyance of feeling guilty and could go straight to compassion. He perceived that, as the representative not only of his own but of her sister’s superior good fortune, he could do his aunt no greater kindness than to let her justify herself to him, and to promise to come and see her perform at his earliest opportunity. For this she rewarded him with the housesitting offer.

  His first days in the city, when he was going from store to store with his hall mate Casey, were like hyper-vivid continuations of the urban dreams he was having all night. Humanity coming at him from every direction. Andean musicians piping and drumming in Union Square. Solemn firefighters nodding to the crowd assembled by a 9/11 shrine outside a station house. A pair of fur-coated ladies ballsily appropriating a cab that Casey had hailed outside Bloomingdale’s. Très hot middle-school girls wearing jeans under their miniskirts and slouching on the subway with their legs wide open. Cornrowed ghetto kids in ominous jumbo parkas, National Guard troops patrolling Grand Central with highly advanced weapons. And the Chinese grandmother hawking DVDs of films that hadn’t even opened yet, the break-dancer who ripped a muscle or a tendon and sat rocking in pain on the floor of the 6 train, the insistent saxophone player to whom Joey gave five dollars to help him get to his gig, despite Casey’s warning that he was being conned: each encounter was like a poem he instantly memorized.

  Casey’s parents lived in an apartment with an elevator that opened directly into it, a must-have feature, Joey decided, if he ever made it big in New York. He joined them for dinner on both Christmas Eve and Christmas, thereby shoring up the lies he’d told his parents about where he was staying for the holidays. Casey and his family were leaving for a ski trip in the morning, however, and Joey knew that he was wearing thin his welcome in any case. When he returned to Abigail’s stale, cluttered apartment and found that Piglet and/or Tigger had vomited in several locations, in punitive feline protest of his long day’s absence, he came up against the strangeness and dumbness of his plan to spend two entire weeks on his own.

  He immediately made everything even worse by speaking to his mother and admitting that some of his plans had “fallen through” and he was housesitting for her sister “instead.”

  “In Abigail’s apartment?” she said. “By yourself? Without her even speaking to me? In New York City? By yourself?”

  “Yep,” Joey said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “you have to tell her that’s not acceptable. Tell her she has to call me right away. Tonight. Right away. Immediately. Non-optional.”

  “It’s way too late for that. She’s in France. It’s OK, though. This is a very safe neighborhood.”

  But his mother wasn’t listening. She was having words with his father, words Joey couldn’t make out but which sounded somewhat hysterical. And then his dad was on the line.

  “Joey? Listen to me. Are you there?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “Listen to me. If you don’t have the personal decency to come and spend a few days with your mother in a house that’s meant so much to her and that you’re never going to set foot in again, that’s fine with me. That was your own terrible decision that you can repent at your leisure. And the stuff you left in your room, which we were hoping you’d come and deal with—we’ll just give it to Goodwill, or let the garbagemen haul it away. That’s your loss, not ours. But to be on your own in a city that you’re too young to be on your own in, a city that’s repeatedly been attacked by terrorists, and not just for a night or two but for weeks, is a recipe for making your mother anxious the entire time.”

  “Dad, it’s a totally safe neighborhood. It’s Greenwich Village.”

  “Well, you’ve ruined her holiday. And you’re going to ruin her last days in this house. I don’t know why I keep expecting more of you at this point, but you are being brutally selfish to a person who loves you more than you can even know.”

  “Why can’t she say it herself, then?” Joey said. “Why do you have to say it? How do I even know it’s true?”

  “If you had one speck of imagination, you’d know it’s true.”

  “Not if she never says it herself! If you’ve got a problem with me, why don’t you tell me what your problem is, instead of always talking about her problems?”

/>   “Because, frankly, I’m not as worried as she is,” his father said. “I don’t think you’re as smart as you think you are, I don’t think you’re aware of all the dangers in the world. But I do think you’re pretty smart and know how to take care of yourself. If you ever did get into trouble, I would hope we’d be the first people you’d call. Otherwise, you’ve made your choice in life, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Well—thanks,” Joey said with only partial sarcasm.

  “Don’t thank me. I have very little respect for what you’re doing. I’m just recognizing that you’re eighteen years old and free to do what you want. What I’m talking about is my personal disappointment that a child of ours can’t find it in his heart to be kinder to his mother.”

  “Why don’t you ask her why not?” Joey countered savagely. “She knows why not! She fucking knows, Dad. Since you’re so wonderfully concerned about her happiness, and all, why don’t you ask her, instead of bothering me?”

  “Don’t talk to me that way.”

  “Well then don’t talk to me that way.”

  “All right, then, I won’t.”

  His father seemed glad to let the subject drop, and Joey was also glad. He relished feeling cool and in control of his life, and it was disturbing to discover that there was this other thing in him, this reservoir of rage, this complex of family feelings that could suddenly explode and take control of him. The angry words he’d spoken to his father had felt pre-formed, as if there were an aggrieved second self inside him 24/7, ordinarily invisible but clearly fully sentient and ready to vent itself, at a moment’s notice, in the form of sentences independent of his volition. It made him wonder who his real self was; and this was very disturbing.

  “If you change your mind,” his father said when they’d exhausted their limited supplies of Christmas chitchat, “I’m more than happy to buy you a plane ticket so you can come out here for a few days. It would mean the world to your mother. And to me, too. I would like that myself.”

  “Thanks,” Joey said, “but, you know, I can’t. I’ve got the cats.”

  “You can put them in a kennel, your aunt will be none the wiser. I’ll pay for that, too.”

  “OK, maybe. Probably not, but maybe.”

  “All right, then, Merry Christmas,” his father said. “Mom says Merry Christmas, too.”

  Joey heard her calling it in the background. Why, exactly, did she not get back on the line and say it to him directly? It seemed pretty damning of her. Another useless admission of her guilt.

  Though Abigail’s apartment wasn’t tiny, there wasn’t one square inch of it unoccupied by Abigail. The cats patrolled it like her plenipotentiaries, depositing hair everywhere. Her bedroom closet was densely packed with pants and sweaters in messy stacks that bunched up the hanging coats and dresses, and her drawers were unopenably stuffed. Her CDs were all unlistenable chanteuses and New Age burble, shelved in double rows and wedged sideways into every chink. Even her books were occupied with Abigail, covering topics like Flow, creative visualization, and the conquering of self-doubt. There was also all manner of mystical accessories, not just Judaica but Eastern incense burners and elephant-headed statuettes. The one thing there wasn’t much in the way of was food. It was now occurring to Joey, as he paced the kitchen, that unless he wanted to eat pizza three times a day he would actually have to go to a grocery store and shop and cook for himself. Abigail’s own food supplies consisted of rice cakes, forty-seven forms of chocolate and cocoa, and instant ramen noodles of the sort that satisfied him for ten minutes and then left him hungry in a new, gnawing way.

  He thought of the spacious house on Barrier Street, he thought of his mother’s outstanding cooking, he thought of caving in and accepting his father’s offer of a plane ticket, but he was determined not to give his hidden self more opportunities to vent itself, and his only option for not continuing to think about St. Paul was to go to Abigail’s brass bed and jerk off, and then to jerk off again while the cats yowled reproachfully outside the bedroom door, and then, still not satisfied, to boot up his aunt’s computer, since he couldn’t get internet on his own computer here, and seek out porn to jerk off to some more. In the way of such things, each free site he happened upon was linked to an even raunchier and more compelling one. Eventually one of these better sites started generating pop-up windows like some Sorcerer’s Apprentice nightmare; it got so bad that he had to shut down the computer. Rebooting impatiently, his abused and sticky dick going limp in his hand, he found the system commandeered by hard-drive-overloading, keyboard-freezing alien software. Never mind that he’d infected his aunt’s computer. Right now he couldn’t get the one thing in the world he wanted, which was to see one more pretty female face distended with ecstasy, so that he could come for a fifth time and try to get a little sleep. He shut his eyes and stroked himself, struggling to summon up enough remembered images to get the job done, but the meowing of the cats was too distracting. He went to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of brandy that he hoped wouldn’t be too expensive to replace.

  Awakening hungover late the next morning, he smelled what he hoped was just cat shit but proved, when he ventured into the cramped and infernally overheated bathroom, to be raw sewage. He called the super, Mr. Jiménez, who arrived two hours later with a wheeled grocery basket filled with plumbing tools.

  “This ol’ building gotta lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, shaking his head fatalistically. He told Joey to be sure to lower the bathtub drain stopper and firmly plug the sinks when he wasn’t using them. These instructions were in fact on Abigail’s list, along with complicated protocols of cat nourishment, but Joey, the day before, in his rush to escape the place and get to Casey’s, had forgotten to follow them.

  “Lotta, lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, using a plunger to nudge West Village waste back down the drain.

  As soon as Joey was alone again and confronting afresh the specter of two weeks of solitude and brandy abuse and/or masturbation, he called Connie and told her he would pay for her bus ticket if she would come out and stay with him. She instantly agreed, except for the part about his paying; and his vacation was saved.

  He hired a geek to fix his aunt’s computer and reconfigure his own, he spent sixty dollars on prepared foods at Dean & DeLuca, and when he went to Port Authority and met Connie at her gate he didn’t think he’d ever been happier to see her. In the previous month, mentally comparing her to the incomparable Jenna, he’d lost sight of how fine she was herself, in her slender, economical, ardent way. She was wearing an unfamiliar peacoat and walked right up to him and put her face against his face and her wide-open eyes against his eyes, as if pressing herself into a mirror. Some drastic all-organ melting occurred inside him. He was about to get laid about forty times, but it was more than that. It was as if the bus station and all the low-income travelers flowing around the two of them were equipped with Brightness and Color controls that were radically lowered by the mere presence of this girl he’d known forever. Everything seemed faint and far away as he led her through passages and halls that he’d seen in living color not thirty minutes earlier.

  In the hours that followed, Connie made several somewhat alarming disclosures. The first came while they were riding the subway down to Charles Street and he asked her how she’d managed to get so much time off at the restaurant—whether she’d found people to cover her shifts.

  “No, I just quit,” she said.

  “You quit? Isn’t this sort of a bad time of year to do that to them?”

  She shrugged. “You needed me here. I told you all you ever have to do is call me.”

  His alarm at this disclosure restored the brightness and color of the subway car. It was like the way his brain on pot would jolt back to present awareness after being lost in a deep stoned reverie: he could see that the other subway riders were leading their lives, pursuing their goals, and that he needed to take care to do this, too. Not get sucked too far into something he couldn�
��t control.

  Mindful of one of their crazier phone-sex episodes, in which the lips of her vagina had opened so fantastically wide that they covered his entire face, and his tongue was so long that its tip could reach her vagina’s inscrutable inner end, he had shaved very carefully before leaving for Port Authority. Now that the two of them were together in the flesh, however, these fantasies revealed their absurdity and were disagreeable to recall. In the apartment, instead of taking Connie straight to bed, as he’d done on the weekend in Virginia, he turned on the TV and checked the score of a college bowl game that meant nothing to him. It then seemed a matter of great urgency to check his e-mail and see if any of his friends had written in the last three hours. Connie sat with the cats on the sofa and waited patiently while his computer powered up.

  “By the way,” she said, “your mom says to say hi.”

  “What?”

  “Your mom says hi. She was out chipping ice when I was leaving. She saw me with my bag and asked where I was going.”

  “And you told her?”

  Connie’s surprise was innocent. “Was I not supposed to? She told me to have a good time and to say hi to you.”

  “Sarcastically?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was, come to think of it. I was just happy she spoke to me at all. I know she hates me. But then I thought maybe she’s finally starting to get used to me.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. You know I’d never say the wrong thing if I knew it was wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

  Joey stood up from his computer, trying not to be angry. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Or only a little bit your fault.”

  “Baby, are you ashamed of me?”